Key takeaways

Jungle Coffee started as a pandemic side-hustle in 2020 and has doubled sales year over year. It has since moved from a shared co-op roastery to its own café and production space in Verdun.
Gabriel Martial treats mental health as a business decision rather than a personal one, and says keeping his six-person team motivated is now his top priority.
Jungle Coffee splits its range into Jungle Classics, The Funky Stuff and Dark Coffee. Traditional roasts sit alongside experimental nano-lots, which pulls in drinkers new to specialty.

Roaster of the Week is a series that focuses on specialty roasters and their unique stories. This week, we spoke with Gabriel Martial, the founder of Jungle Coffee in Montreal, Canada. He told us about graduating from a cooperative roasting space, and why protecting mental health is crucial when scaling a business.

Jungle Coffee was born out of the quiet chaos that was 2020. While some specialty roasters might start with years of meticulous business planning, Jungle Coffee began as a passionate side-hustle and pop-up during the COVID-19 pandemic. It quickly snowballed into a thriving enterprise, doubling its sales year over year while capturing the attention of Montreal’s highly competitive coffee scene.

Since launching in late 2020, the Montreal brand has seen tremendous growth. It graduated from the Canadian Roasting Society co-op facility to a brand-new integrated café and roastery in the Verdun neighbourhood. We sat down with Gabriel to discuss this ambitious journey, his view of work-life balance, and his mission to make specialty coffee accessible to everyone. Read on for his insights.

The pandemic pivot and prioritising mental health

When the pandemic first hit in 2020, Gabriel was managing the coffee program at Hélicoptère and Hélico. The pair are a popular fine-dining restaurant-and-café duo in Montreal’s Hochelaga neighbourhood.

With the dining room shut down and the business pivoting to takeout only, his usual fast-paced routine ground to a halt. The sudden surplus of free time and energy pushed him to explore a new avenue: roasting his own coffee.

A friend suggested he become a member of the Canadian Roasting Society in the city’s Southwest. It allows roasters to rent equipment and production time without the crushing overhead of a commercial lease. Shared roasting spaces have become a standard first step for roasters who want production capacity before they can carry a facility of their own.

“My goal at first was really just to try something new, have a little space at Hélico to show my coffee, and sell a bit,” Gabriel tells us.

During those early days, he created a digital folder simply titled Qu’est-ce qu’on fait aujourd’hui? (What are we doing today?). “Monday we’d try to do this, Tuesday we’d try to do that – it was really just to keep our weeks occupied and stay busy,” he laughs.

But as other local cafés struggled or closed and friends began requesting his beans, Jungle Coffee’s wholesale demand soon skyrocketed. To build brand awareness in a crowded local market, Gabriel leaned heavily on grassroots collaborations.

“I had a friend who grew plants, and a neighbour who was a tattoo artist,” he recalls. “So we started doing these ‘Coffee, Plant, Tattoo’ pop-up events. It was a great way to put bags in the hands of people who didn’t know us yet.”

However, this rapid scaling and workload took a significant toll. Gabriel suddenly found himself working gruelling seven-day weeks, juggling his café shifts with late-night roasting orders and exhausting wholesale pitches across town.

“Staying happy – that was a real struggle in the first year,” Gabriel admits openly. “Mental health is huge. You’re doing cold calls, and nine times out of ten, it’s a ‘no’. It’s tough.”

With a background in sales, Gabriel was able to brush aside those rejections to build lasting relationships with local café partners. Today, as the company expands, he notes that maintaining his team’s morale is his absolute top priority. Staff turnover remains one of the most expensive problems in coffee, and managing shortages starts with keeping the people already on the team.

“There are six of us now, and I force myself to stay happy for them because I don’t want to destroy their great motivation,” he adds. “I want to be the boss I never had.”

Graduating from the Canadian Roasting Society

As Jungle Coffee’s volume surged, jumping from $40,000 in early sales to over a quarter-million by year three, Gabriel realised he couldn’t do it alone.

He found a crucial lifeline in David Ollu, his former boss at Hélico, who stepped in as a business partner after Gabriel’s original co-founder moved on.

“He has always been a role model to me in terms of diligence, efficiency, and taking work seriously,” Gabriel says with admiration of David. “If I can manage to be half of that, we’re good.”

David’s involvement enabled Jungle Coffee to stabilise its cash flow, secure funding for larger green coffee purchases, and plan strategically for the brand’s future.

That future has now come to pass, as the team has recently left the Canadian Roasting Society’s safety net. The cooperative model has always been an incredible incubator for startups like Jungle Coffee. Sharing a facility can still create friction when a brand outgrows its allocated time slots. Perfect Daily Grind has covered why co-roasting spaces keep growing and where slot roasting starts to strain.

“There comes a point where the hours you would like to work just don’t exist anymore,” Gabriel says, recalling the exhaustion of 4:30 AM starts just to secure time on the roaster. “You pay the price of not having your own setup, working when you really don’t want to work.”

Today, Jungle Coffee is ironing out the kinks at its own dedicated roastery and café space in Verdun. The space includes dedicated offices, ample storage, a production facility, a quality lab, roasting infrastructure, and an adjacent retail space to showcase Jungle Coffee. MTPak Coffee’s guide to creating an efficient roastery covers how those pieces fit together. Its guide to scaling a roasting business sets out what changes at this stage.

Moving away from the cooperative means taking on commercial loans and signing a lease, but for Gabriel, the tipping point had been reached.

“We’re at that point where moving out, paying rent, and paying for gas is actually cheaper and better for us than staying at CRS,” he explains.

The new shop will feature a Probat 12-kilo roaster. It also lets the team operate on a normal Monday-to-Friday schedule, restoring much-needed work-life balance.

“It’s a real business now,” Gabriel says proudly. “We’re building a career path and a life plan, not just for me, but for my employees too.”

Sourcing, sustainability, and breaking the specialty bubble

With a permanent home base secured, Gabriel continues to push the boundaries of his coffee program while remaining radically inclusive. Jungle Coffee’s lineup is divided into three approachable pillars: Jungle Classics, The Funky Stuff, and Dark Coffee, plus occasional small-lot special releases.

By offering more developed, traditional roasts alongside experimental, fruity nano-lots, Gabriel hopes to win over standard coffee drinkers. Roast level shapes what the packaging has to do as well, and MTPak Coffee’s guide to designing packaging for different roast levels covers that ground. Perfect Daily Grind has also made the case that darker profiles still have a place when roasters give consumers what they want.

When asked what advice he would give to up-and-coming roasters, Gabriel says with a laugh and a wry smile: “Don’t do it.” But he quickly clarifies his stance, telling us, “The macro market is ultra-competitive, and it’s tough to carve out a place.”

“But on a micro level, specialty coffee is still only a small fraction of the market here in Quebec. Most people who don’t drink specialty coffee simply don’t know it exists,” Gabriel explains.

“They’ve never experienced the difference in quality, the human approach, and the connection you have with your roaster.”

By acting as an evangelist for better coffee, Jungle Coffee aims to bridge that gap, now fully on its own terms while prioritising a healthy, happy workplace. That question of how to encourage more people to drink specialty coffee sits at the centre of the category’s next decade.

For roasters looking to upgrade their brand as they scale, MTPak Coffee offers a wide range of custom coffee bag packaging tailored to your unique identity. Whether you are graduating from a co-roasting space or launching a new café, our sustainable packaging solutions help keep your coffee fresh while minimising your environmental impact. That includes fully compostable coffee bags.

Contact our team to talk through your next run.

FAQs

Why did Jungle Coffee leave its co-roasting space?
Volume outgrew the hours available. Gabriel Martial describes 4:30 AM starts just to secure time on a shared roaster. With rent and gas on its own site now costing less than staying, the move also restored a Monday-to-Friday schedule.

How does Jungle Coffee protect mental health while scaling?
Gabriel treats team morale as the top priority rather than an afterthought. He is candid about the first year of cold calls and seven-day weeks. He also says he forces himself to stay positive for his six staff: “I want to be the boss I never had.”

What coffees does Jungle Coffee roast?
The range splits into three pillars: Jungle Classics, The Funky Stuff and Dark Coffee, with occasional small-lot special releases. Traditional developed roasts sit beside experimental fruity nano-lots, which is how Gabriel reaches drinkers new to specialty.